Monday, January 31, 2011

Mostly I have a quite vague grasp of the seasonal timelines that govern when flowers appear but every year on the last day of January I know there will be at least a few cherry blossoms on the naked twigs of the little black-barked street trees that can be seen almost anyplace in San Francisco because it has been true on the last day of January annually for the past forty years and was surely true even before that when I wasn't here to observe the fact. The ones above grow in a vulnerable row on Church Street alongside Mission Dolores School and are often vandalized.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

The beautiful, silent photo blog known as Silas & Eppie resumes activity tomorrow on my birthday, Monday 31 January 2011. This daily pairing of images, with click-through links back to their sources, originated in September 2008 as my daughter's brainchild. She proposed that every weekday morning she should choose an image and I should choose an image from anywhere in the limitless vastness of cyberspace and then post them side by side without any prior idea of what the other person intended. Our mutual early-morning activity thus turned into a sort of two-sided familial Exquisite Corpse game that proved quite sufficiently entertaining for our modest purposes.

Two years later Silas & Eppie went into hiatus at the same time my daughter took leave from her busy career editing art and design books in order to give birth to that glorious being now known as Mabel Watson Payne, and to nurture her at home. Now a new phase begins, and my granddaughter will be spending her days with the daddy – who has saved up the parental leave from his teaching job for just this time. Later still (some while after we all return from the trip to Rome in March) it will be my own inestimable privilege to contribute a month of daytime care. These and other ingenious arrangements will allow my daughter to immerse herself once more in publishing projects while simultaneously mothering the flourishing rosebud-offspring.

Here then let us welcome Silas & Eppieback into palpitating kinetic dailiness. To honor that event, I offer an image-selection of personal favorites from the S&E archive.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Attended the opening night of San Francisco Ballet, rainy and cold and marvelous in every way – because Yuan Yuan Tan (above) danced Giselle.

This is her fifteenth season as a Principal Dancer with San Francisco Ballet. It must have been about 1997 when I first had the unearned luck to witness the Giselle of Yuan Yuan Tan. After many subsequent viewings it remains my favorite of her roles – the tender weightlessness of every step and gesture, as if she were dancing on the moon in thinner air than ours, with gravity absent. At any given time in the history of the world there can of course only by a few truly great performing artists. It would be reason enough all by itself to live in San Francisco, knowing that one of the present few is living and working here.

Other people will write long & learned reviews about this particular cast in this simple little fable of undying love as it is told without words and solely through movement (starkly, romantically, surrealistically). Other people are good at that kind of writing, but it doesn't suit me. I'll finish more simply – especially since it's already long past my bedtime – with a few additional images of YYT from other ballets, pictures I discovered fairly recently and have not posted before.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Never up-to-the-minute, I just got around to reading this 2008 novel by Joan Silber called The Size of the World. Sooner or later I will read whatever she writes out of simple gratitude for her 2001 novel Lucky Us which I read aloud to my convalescing daughter, who had her wisdom teeth pulled shortly after that book came out. What a spectacular diversion it turned out to be. We both thought Lucky Us was the most convincing and unsentimental yet moving modern-days love story we had ever read, and for my part I still think so. The new book works extremely well too – a much more intricate piece of craftsmanship (from a technical point of view) with six interlocking sections, each narrated by a different character inhabiting a different range of geographies in a different span of time. Frankly, I have abandoned a number of books (including McEwan's hugely popular Atonement) when the voice of a narrator I liked was dropped and a new narrator stood up to speak. Silber's six voices would not permit any such grumpy dissatisfactions, though I do not really know by what trick she makes them so urgently interesting. Partly it must be the way she handles her big theme of east-west colonialism and war as it consistently inundates these various bit players on the global stage. The compromised idealism of fictional characters is even more difficult to render credibly then the love-lives of fictional characters – I suppose politics is even harder than love to represent justly (and not wishfully) in a work of art. So I am a few years late here, but still wanted to give Joan Silber credit for her great success in The Size of the World.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Lord Byron did not care for the sculptures, calling them "misshapen monuments." He strongly objected to their removal from Greece, denouncing Elgin as a vandal. His view of the removal of the Marbles from Athens is also reflected poetically in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

I have followed fashion stylist Nicola Formichetti's blog for longer than Spencer Alley has existed, and so watched his career skyrocket from admirable but fairly ordinary mainstream success designing photo shoots for fashion magazines to outright superstardom after he became Lady Gaga's executive wardrobe consultant. At the British Fashion Awards just last month Daphne Guinness crowned him Fashion Creator of the Year, and this month Formichetti presented his first runway show as creative director of the Paris couture house of Thierry Mugler. The film of the show seen below was directed by Mariano Vivanco. And the friendly Gaga pitched in with the music.

COMRADES OF TIME

"Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present – even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted for the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the 'body of work' replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. . . . But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. Museums have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned – the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable."